My Nonprofit Reviews

I started volunteering with SHN through my Church. As an adult youth volunteer I went to many events and had a great time, The events are easy, quick, have great music and if run properly just a touch chaotic. After several years I volunteered to run events and now run 2-3 events a month. I'm the guy that arrives with a truck of ingredients, bins, funnels etc., helps you set up, talks a few minutes, loads the packaged food back up and drives it to the warehouse. I live in Raleigh where SHN was founded and we packaged 3.5 million meals last year (85M to date for all SHN locations!). They don't sit in the warehouse we couldn't afford the storage :-). Every few weeks we load up a container with 285,000 meals and out it goes to a partner organization. A few months ago Rev Solomon who runs a school in Uganda and also the warehouse that supports 9 other schools came to one of my events. It was an event with 450 third graders and he was very moved to see kids packaging meals for his students. This is typical, an in country partner provides a secure warehouse to store up to a years worth of meals and distributes the meals. Stop Hunger Now visits partners periodically to verify this. As far as I know no meals are handled by any government (occasionally we donate after a disaster like the Haiti earthquake - that may be an exception - not sure). BTW SHN is not designed to provide short term relief the reason 95% of the meals go to schools and orphanages is that by concentrating on the kids being in school, their economics change in many ways from being better educated to having less children this is how the cycle of poverty is broken. SHN's vision is to "End Hunger in Our Lifetime". One more thing SHN has grown almost exclusively by word of mouth, almost no marketing or advertising. You pay $0.25/meal when you run an event almost 100% goes to the food, running the event and the warehouse. Visit the web site!

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